This is the first public hospital built in Costa Rica, it was founded in 1845. It belongs to the CCSS and has all the medical-surgical specialties. It is located at the intersection between Avenida Segunda and Paseo Colón, in the Hospital district, in the heart of the city of San José.
There is a famous legend of a nun who walks through the hospital, she is known as the nun with the glass.
According to legend, it is the suffering soul of a nun who, in life, denied this last wish to a dying man, which is why she was cursed, since then, she walks at night through the corridors of the old hospital, offering to the sick the glass of water that in life she denied. The legend says that those who drink from the glass, heal miraculously, while other versions say that, faced with the fear that the apparition produces, no one accepts the glass, so the nun’s soul cannot rest.
The origin of the legend is related to the fact that the San Juan de Dios Hospital, founded in 1845, it began to be administered since 1865 by the Sisters of Charity, a female Catholic religious congregation dedicated to the corporal and spiritual service of the poor amd sick. These nuns wore a black habit with a white collar, and instead of a veil on their heads they wore a cornette, a kind of white hat with wings, whose shape resembles a paper boat. The hospital, despite the changes of modernity, has preserved a large part of its old corridors and original rooms, which has contributed, over the years, to the legend remaining in force, as it happens with many ancient buildings around the world and the country where the people who inhabited them had some kind of suffering and died, letting their suffering souls wandering this places.
Do you believe this is real?
In my personal experience and opinion, I think this kind of legends are somehow true, I don´t believe in this one in specific that talks about the nun that wanders throught the Hospital, but I believe that there are some souls that couldn´t rest in peace and now are wandering in the “Mortal World”. Also I believe in the presence of spirits because my aunt works as a nurse in this Hospital and once she told me that she saw the spirit of a little girl walking down the hall.
